Will _people_ research techniques to save their own lives of the lives of their loved ones for altruistic reasons, or simply reasons other than cash profit motive?
Why is it always 'well, companies will'?
If companies are not capable of the full range of motives and drives that humans have, despite having the same rights (or more) under the law, then maybe the problem is with the companies, not with humans or with the law.
That's pretty insane. On the one hand, this announcement suggests that MS hasn't been putting any effort into bugfixing and reliability at all, just getting stuff to compile and work in the current context with the stuff they've got. On the other hand, they still aren't, they're just making announcements about it? Ugly scene.
Find out if your friends were able to _learn_ of such a moratorium, now that they have heard about it on slashdot. Maybe they weren't told because they have to finish new code in order to be ready to go audit old code:)
I am a Mac user and coder myself... I prefer free programs from brilliant, committed authors (SoundApp, SoundHack, SoundEffects, Panorama Tools, BBEdit Lite, MPW, there's actually a lot of them out there). But there are some shareware programs that I've spent money on- I've bought several programs from Greg Landweber (Kaleidoscope, SmoothType) and I bought Amadeus (Martin Hairer) and I bought Meshwork (Joseph Strout).
The common factors are: these programs had some utility even without registering, and I was confident that they would not sink to complete paranoia. The cripple-qualities were predictable and not totally disruptive. And the price was less than $30 or so, with the benefits great- I used Kaleidoscope for years. I still use Amadeus's spectrum analysis constantly. (And Meshwork is just really elegant and functional and was quite cheap, though I've not made much use of it yet).
Right now I'm coding on my own major software product, Mastering Tools. I'd just recently shifted the program over to GUI knob-based operation, and listed it on VersionTracker (like Freshmeat for Mac people), getting thousands of downloads. It still had some kinks to work out, and that's what I'm doing- currently revising file reading so it's more professional, by ditching the 'pipe-like' approach I'd started with. I've also added a really slick graphical progress display that, I think, beats anything out there: shows RMS and peak levels over time, degree of 'flat-topping' (grunge, distortion), differences between L and R channels in color, and a continuing Benford Realness analysis as applied to audio data, which NOBODY does. I rewrote the normalization ('scan') code so it balances the channels to RMS levels instead of peak, making L/R balance idiotically simple. I've mostly got through the file rewrite, have to test it, may be listing the new version on VersionTracker before Monday...
No, it's not 'shareware'. It is Free software. As in 'GPLed'. Why? Because that is where my sympathies lie. I want to get tools like this in the hands of people like me. And GPLing (the major way to _keep_ people sharing their code, in the real world) is just damn useful. I'll tell you what, did you know where I got the idea for the file rewrite, when I previously didn't have a plan for the revision? I got it from the GPLed C source for LAME. That has AIFF reading code in it, and showed me the way.
I hope that my own code can do the same for somebody one day- whether I know it or not, whether I get paid off it or not. Right now, it's whoever wrote that LAME AIFF code who is helping me- without knowing it, they have helped to improve a radical Mac-based audio mastering application, and indirectly they can even help me earn money by their generosity.
How? Not by me selling their code. Mastering Tools is for a PURPOSE. Audio mastering is a very skilled craft, and just giving people the tools won't make them mastering engineers (I'll give them anyway but it won't help them so much:) ). You have to have very serious monitoring, you have to know what you're doing. The real pros can get paid hundreds of dollars an hour. I don't need anything like that much... I'm gearing up to be able to do really good mastering for the indie crowd. What the LAME code's done for me is helped streamline my mastering workflow- if stuff comes in that's a weird AIFF with lots of data chunks embedded in it, I don't have to convert it to a simpler AIFF with SoundHack anymore. That saves time, and time is money...
So, I guess the bottom line is... I am happy to pay for important shareware, but I don't want to emulate the shareware authors. I like programming better when it is communication. 'I did it this way' 'oh! That solves my problem'. That's what I want to stick to.
Cool. I'd love to hear her on eggs. Eggs are bizarre.:) Julia Child is eloquent on the mysteriousness of what happens to eggs under different conditions.
Do you run a business, 'foobar'? That sounds like a distressingly dotcomesque point of view to me- definitely not any sort of truly insightful business practice.
The RESULT of a business is (one hopes!) to generate revenue. The job of the business is providing a product or service, in essence doing some sort of work for people.
If you believe the job of a business is to generate revenue, I hope you're in a business that competes with mine;)
Thankfully (harmfully?) the real world will provide feedback on whether you have any idea what you're talking about.
Open source and communication in computing brought C, Unix, the Internet, e-mail, etc.
What has your information-control ethic brought?.NET? Wait and see how well THAT works.
The concern is simply that the attitude you seem to approve of tends to stifle progress. Of course, you could simply insist on your self-centered view and insist that the resulting rate of progress is the best of all possible worlds. Buy some old copies of 'Pravda' from the post-collapse Soviet Union, that could help show you how to argue such points...
Oh, OK- so stashing it away in a swiss bank account is 'in circulation'?
It's a separate argument whether buying out companies to completely control them, buying up technologies to take them out of the market, and dumping products to kill other technologies and businesses is really 'money in circulation' in a useful way. But that's as may be...
You seem to be trying to justify the proposition, "having as much money as possible is automatically good for the economy". History would tend to disagree... you're assuming that as long as money is somewhere, doing something, even if it's sitting there in Switzerland, it counts. It would be well to pay more attention to WHAT that money is doing.
Suppose Japan was dumping steel in the USA to try and drive U.S. steel producers out of business. Would you still see that as good for the economy?
Oh, so he cannot put the money back into the economy because nobody could spend or give it away faster than his corporate combine harvester rakes it in?
That's nice. Have you any suggestions for what to do in the end game, when the economy's croaking because all the money's been taken away and stored somewhere in Redmond?
Arguing that Gates can't spend that kind of money does not help your case. It's only more evidence that this money is being taken out of circulation. That's a problem, not a victory.
Oh, that's really cute. Are they doing peak limiting or compressing? Do you have some sort of reference that this is what they are doing?
Great, not only is popular music smashed with limiting to within an inch of its life, but now Microsoft makes it policy to add another 3 db??? of smash just to beat other codecs in comparisons by untutored listeners?
There's actually a lot that can be done with doctoring the recorded values of FFT transforms. It's similar to spectral dynamics processing (in fact it IS exactly that). You could do it in playback with mp3, or ogg, or anything. You could build it into players as another sort of 'knob' to turn for those bored by EQs. But it is repugnant to have Microsoft building additional dynamics processing into their goddamned CODEC. My god, isn't popular music volume-smashed enough?
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Whoa- wild misconceptions here:D
What's really going on is this: using aggressive, fast-release peak limiting, musicians can get mastering engineers to push the volume of their CDs past zero. Actually, one popular technique is in fact clipping and then taking the overall volume down 0.2 db or so (to get rid of digital full scale values that can cause problems glass mastering, and with D/A converters)
Mastering engineers have been trapped in a jam comparable to clueful sysadmins being ordered to standardize on W2K/IIS: what's driving it is A&R reps and radio. Briefly, there are a lot of fools out there who figure their CD will sell better and get on the radio better if only it is louder than the next guy's. Sometimes that's even true as some of the radio program directors are also idiots who love horrible distortion and blasting loudness...
The trick is, there is NO one volume level that is 'the loudest' you can get out of digital. It's simply a tradeoff- how much distortion and grunge can you tolerate? It can be like putting a CD into a distortion box almost: look at modern music in a sound editor and you'll see a black ribbon because every sound is slammed to digital full scale. Look closer and it looks like the peaks get planed off with a surface planer. Sometimes this sounds like flat-out distortion, sometimes it doesn't, but it all more or less damages the richness of the sound.
At least with modern CDs, I'm not aware of ANY studios that put out CDs with peaks only going to part of digital full scale. The problem is in the other extreme- they pretty much all cover digital full scale peak to peak, but push beyond that in wildly varying amounts, which affects the RMS level. Some of the greatest albums in history were recorded with crest factor (amount peak is higher than RMS level) of 20 db and up, as much as 24 db sometimes (the Boston debut album). Some of your modern albums have a mere 6 db crest factor, or even less. If you put them on after the older album, they blast out your speakers and you have to turn it down (as the original poster said). Once you've turned it down, it's the same volume only sounds much lamer and weaker.
Which is all just a lot of information, no doubt, except that it is also the reason why your advice will totally NOT WORK in the slightest. Now, if you were talking about a 'normalize' function that looked at RMS volume it might be different...
...and by the same token, they will not do any of that should they buy Red Hat: it can rot on the vine as long as it symbolically represents a possible source of leverage to keep Microsoft ready to allow AOL to work on Windows.
Result: AOL on Windows, only- protected from ever having to be on Linux by the THREAT of it being on Linux.
Plus, as another poster suggested, they probably just want RH support for their own machines. "We liked Linux as a server so much, we bought the company..."
Be damned careful! You could get the reverse effect, or worse. They could decide patents need to be life+75. That's not even the most extreme case... The last thing we need is for the courts to make both patents AND copyrights last forever and never expire at all...
Two questions. One, it's all very well to talk about this but isn't it like rewriting Netscape from the ground up? Isn't it either totally meaningless or an announcement of a complete energy sink at Microsoft which will immobilize them?
Two, to what extent is this an agenda for obliterating any shred of interoperability with other commercial products in the name of 'security'? Isn't it an open invitation to claim that total and complete lock-in is the only way to be 'secure'?
Given that the BSA is supported in busting into people's homes and workplaces to hack through their computers, damage non-Microsoft computers and install keyloggers and bugs on Microsoft computers in order to hold customers to THEIR obligations, it seems only reasonable that companies like Microsoft should be subject to equally ruthless methods to hold them to CUSTOMER obligations.
If they weren't calling in federal marshals for help in conducting audits, it might seem different, but what possible excuse is there for releasing them from any and all responsibility while THEY can have people with guns and warrants busting into your workplace and tearing apart all your computers?
Hold them to the same strict code that they hold others, and give it just as many teeth as they want to use against you. Granted, that would be hard (imagine getting a warrant to rip apart all the Windows development systems at Microsoft to look for evidence that a bug was maliciously ignored!) but it is starkly insane to expect these guys to have police-like powers yet be exempt from all responsibility themselves.
That is all fair enough, but the current state of affairs is more like cars that are sold with portable nuclear weapons under the seats, which randomly explode killing everybody, and the controls are implemented via radio control in such a way that anyone can take over control of your car with a powerful transmitter and drive you into other people if they want. And the car makers (maker?) is fully aware of these things but covers them up rather than even TELLING car buyers of them.
Don't you think in your depiction of one crazy extreme (cotton wool 5 mph cars) you are failing to recognize that the reality for computer software is the opposite crazy extreme?
If the likes of Sheldon is against this, I'm definitely for it;)
Seriously- I don't buy most of what he's saying here, I'm just reading the 'nooooooo! i'm meltiinnnngg!' between the lines. The REAL prospect upsetting Sheldon is the prospect of product liability _eviscerating_ Microsoft.
They're awfully vulnerable around about now, can't continue their geometric progression that props up their stock, and I don't believe in the myth about their piles of cash- I suspect that is a useful lie. Everyone wants to believe that is true, but who has seriously done the accounting work? Microsoft lie, you can't forget that.
Well, those of us (like me) who find this really cute aren't really thinking in terms of cost and usefulness. I'm a mac user myself, I'm not _expecting_ this to be really competitive. I'm looking at what it is. It's a tiny, _elegant_ arrangement of generic hardware that could potentially be really cheap to buy, and will get more so in future- it's an aluminum case, not a tin can (I like that especially, it's part of the cuteness though it adds cost)- and I can't look at it without picturing it running WindowMaker or maybe even just console or some fascinating, alien hybrid. It's like there's the possibility for it to go off in totally other directions from the computers we're used to, simply because it's really a very generic device, and because it LOOKS different than most PCs do. With such a compact arrangement it blatantly suggests a different path from the usual windows huge morass of cab files and 'look how many junky game sound cards you could buy if you wanted'. It makes me think of focus, of getting rid of waste and coming up with some elegant little workspace to live in that resonates with the elegant little looks of the tiny thing. Like I've said, the first thoughts that come to my mind are- ballbearing fans and underclocking, and getting special low-noise drives for it, so it could sit on the desk and be whisper-quiet despite the lack of space for sound absorption inside it.
That's something I know about as my current desktop and work machines are already whisper-quiet- but they are PowerMacs without need for CPU fans, and they are tower or short tower cases with space inside for acoustic foam. Handled right this little machine could be as quiet and unobtrusive...
Well, I am a Mac user and have seen iMacs and I agree that it's cuter than an iMac. I also want one more than I want an iMac, but only if it runs linux:) that is also presuming that I can have my Macs to get my work done. But I can just imagine doing this web browsing and continual internet-connecting over one of these teeny buggers, perhaps with a nice WindowMaker interface on it and all the parts set up to furnish macstyle cut and paste between each other.
That, or since it is plainly capable of processing and I/O sufficient for basic multitrack recording with the right PCI card (and breakout box?), how about picturing it as a teeny Audacity host box? Call it a dedicated DAW and boot it straight into the DAW software, run realtime.
It's very encouraging that these things are not only happening, but can be appealing. I think my only remaining question would be: could this bitty box be not only cute but dead silent? What if you underclock the 1ghz cpu by about 50%?
Slashdot Mirror
Will _people_ research techniques to save their own lives of the lives of their loved ones for altruistic reasons, or simply reasons other than cash profit motive?
Why is it always 'well, companies will'?
If companies are not capable of the full range of motives and drives that humans have, despite having the same rights (or more) under the law, then maybe the problem is with the companies, not with humans or with the law.
Devoting their lives to clearing minefields without equipment or pay isn't really necessary :D
That's cool. They've solved DLL hell by statically linking 'em to the programs, eh? ;)
Find out if your friends were able to _learn_ of such a moratorium, now that they have heard about it on slashdot. Maybe they weren't told because they have to finish new code in order to be ready to go audit old code :)
The common factors are: these programs had some utility even without registering, and I was confident that they would not sink to complete paranoia. The cripple-qualities were predictable and not totally disruptive. And the price was less than $30 or so, with the benefits great- I used Kaleidoscope for years. I still use Amadeus's spectrum analysis constantly. (And Meshwork is just really elegant and functional and was quite cheap, though I've not made much use of it yet).
Right now I'm coding on my own major software product, Mastering Tools. I'd just recently shifted the program over to GUI knob-based operation, and listed it on VersionTracker (like Freshmeat for Mac people), getting thousands of downloads. It still had some kinks to work out, and that's what I'm doing- currently revising file reading so it's more professional, by ditching the 'pipe-like' approach I'd started with. I've also added a really slick graphical progress display that, I think, beats anything out there: shows RMS and peak levels over time, degree of 'flat-topping' (grunge, distortion), differences between L and R channels in color, and a continuing Benford Realness analysis as applied to audio data, which NOBODY does. I rewrote the normalization ('scan') code so it balances the channels to RMS levels instead of peak, making L/R balance idiotically simple. I've mostly got through the file rewrite, have to test it, may be listing the new version on VersionTracker before Monday...
No, it's not 'shareware'. It is Free software. As in 'GPLed'. Why? Because that is where my sympathies lie. I want to get tools like this in the hands of people like me. And GPLing (the major way to _keep_ people sharing their code, in the real world) is just damn useful. I'll tell you what, did you know where I got the idea for the file rewrite, when I previously didn't have a plan for the revision? I got it from the GPLed C source for LAME. That has AIFF reading code in it, and showed me the way.
I hope that my own code can do the same for somebody one day- whether I know it or not, whether I get paid off it or not. Right now, it's whoever wrote that LAME AIFF code who is helping me- without knowing it, they have helped to improve a radical Mac-based audio mastering application, and indirectly they can even help me earn money by their generosity.
How? Not by me selling their code. Mastering Tools is for a PURPOSE. Audio mastering is a very skilled craft, and just giving people the tools won't make them mastering engineers (I'll give them anyway but it won't help them so much :) ). You have to have very serious monitoring, you have to know what you're doing. The real pros can get paid hundreds of dollars an hour. I don't need anything like that much... I'm gearing up to be able to do really good mastering for the indie crowd. What the LAME code's done for me is helped streamline my mastering workflow- if stuff comes in that's a weird AIFF with lots of data chunks embedded in it, I don't have to convert it to a simpler AIFF with SoundHack anymore. That saves time, and time is money...
So, I guess the bottom line is... I am happy to pay for important shareware, but I don't want to emulate the shareware authors. I like programming better when it is communication. 'I did it this way' 'oh! That solves my problem'. That's what I want to stick to.
He's just mad because it gets in the way of world domination. What's so implausible about that?
Cool. I'd love to hear her on eggs. Eggs are bizarre. :) Julia Child is eloquent on the mysteriousness of what happens to eggs under different conditions.
Do you run a business, 'foobar'? That sounds like a distressingly dotcomesque point of view to me- definitely not any sort of truly insightful business practice.
The RESULT of a business is (one hopes!) to generate revenue. The job of the business is providing a product or service, in essence doing some sort of work for people.
If you believe the job of a business is to generate revenue, I hope you're in a business that competes with mine ;)
Open source and communication in computing brought C, Unix, the Internet, e-mail, etc.
What has your information-control ethic brought? .NET? Wait and see how well THAT works.
The concern is simply that the attitude you seem to approve of tends to stifle progress. Of course, you could simply insist on your self-centered view and insist that the resulting rate of progress is the best of all possible worlds. Buy some old copies of 'Pravda' from the post-collapse Soviet Union, that could help show you how to argue such points...
It's a separate argument whether buying out companies to completely control them, buying up technologies to take them out of the market, and dumping products to kill other technologies and businesses is really 'money in circulation' in a useful way. But that's as may be...
You seem to be trying to justify the proposition, "having as much money as possible is automatically good for the economy". History would tend to disagree... you're assuming that as long as money is somewhere, doing something, even if it's sitting there in Switzerland, it counts. It would be well to pay more attention to WHAT that money is doing.
Suppose Japan was dumping steel in the USA to try and drive U.S. steel producers out of business. Would you still see that as good for the economy?
That's nice. Have you any suggestions for what to do in the end game, when the economy's croaking because all the money's been taken away and stored somewhere in Redmond?
Arguing that Gates can't spend that kind of money does not help your case. It's only more evidence that this money is being taken out of circulation. That's a problem, not a victory.
Great, not only is popular music smashed with limiting to within an inch of its life, but now Microsoft makes it policy to add another 3 db??? of smash just to beat other codecs in comparisons by untutored listeners?
There's actually a lot that can be done with doctoring the recorded values of FFT transforms. It's similar to spectral dynamics processing (in fact it IS exactly that). You could do it in playback with mp3, or ogg, or anything. You could build it into players as another sort of 'knob' to turn for those bored by EQs. But it is repugnant to have Microsoft building additional dynamics processing into their goddamned CODEC. My god, isn't popular music volume-smashed enough?
What's really going on is this: using aggressive, fast-release peak limiting, musicians can get mastering engineers to push the volume of their CDs past zero. Actually, one popular technique is in fact clipping and then taking the overall volume down 0.2 db or so (to get rid of digital full scale values that can cause problems glass mastering, and with D/A converters)
Mastering engineers have been trapped in a jam comparable to clueful sysadmins being ordered to standardize on W2K/IIS: what's driving it is A&R reps and radio. Briefly, there are a lot of fools out there who figure their CD will sell better and get on the radio better if only it is louder than the next guy's. Sometimes that's even true as some of the radio program directors are also idiots who love horrible distortion and blasting loudness...
The trick is, there is NO one volume level that is 'the loudest' you can get out of digital. It's simply a tradeoff- how much distortion and grunge can you tolerate? It can be like putting a CD into a distortion box almost: look at modern music in a sound editor and you'll see a black ribbon because every sound is slammed to digital full scale. Look closer and it looks like the peaks get planed off with a surface planer. Sometimes this sounds like flat-out distortion, sometimes it doesn't, but it all more or less damages the richness of the sound.
At least with modern CDs, I'm not aware of ANY studios that put out CDs with peaks only going to part of digital full scale. The problem is in the other extreme- they pretty much all cover digital full scale peak to peak, but push beyond that in wildly varying amounts, which affects the RMS level. Some of the greatest albums in history were recorded with crest factor (amount peak is higher than RMS level) of 20 db and up, as much as 24 db sometimes (the Boston debut album). Some of your modern albums have a mere 6 db crest factor, or even less. If you put them on after the older album, they blast out your speakers and you have to turn it down (as the original poster said). Once you've turned it down, it's the same volume only sounds much lamer and weaker.
Which is all just a lot of information, no doubt, except that it is also the reason why your advice will totally NOT WORK in the slightest. Now, if you were talking about a 'normalize' function that looked at RMS volume it might be different...
Result: AOL on Windows, only- protected from ever having to be on Linux by the THREAT of it being on Linux.
Plus, as another poster suggested, they probably just want RH support for their own machines. "We liked Linux as a server so much, we bought the company..."
If you're buying copies of Windows just to resist the chance that AOL/TW will become as evil as Microsoft, you are a fool.
If it bothers you so much, why not refuse to buy anything from either of them... if you can?
Be damned careful! You could get the reverse effect, or worse. They could decide patents need to be life+75. That's not even the most extreme case... The last thing we need is for the courts to make both patents AND copyrights last forever and never expire at all...
Actually, the book publishers are now trying to stamp out libraries, beginning with lobbying of Congress.
translation- "Microsoft Licensing 6.0 wants to cum on your face"
Two, to what extent is this an agenda for obliterating any shred of interoperability with other commercial products in the name of 'security'? Isn't it an open invitation to claim that total and complete lock-in is the only way to be 'secure'?
If they weren't calling in federal marshals for help in conducting audits, it might seem different, but what possible excuse is there for releasing them from any and all responsibility while THEY can have people with guns and warrants busting into your workplace and tearing apart all your computers?
Hold them to the same strict code that they hold others, and give it just as many teeth as they want to use against you. Granted, that would be hard (imagine getting a warrant to rip apart all the Windows development systems at Microsoft to look for evidence that a bug was maliciously ignored!) but it is starkly insane to expect these guys to have police-like powers yet be exempt from all responsibility themselves.
Don't you think in your depiction of one crazy extreme (cotton wool 5 mph cars) you are failing to recognize that the reality for computer software is the opposite crazy extreme?
Seriously- I don't buy most of what he's saying here, I'm just reading the 'nooooooo! i'm meltiinnnngg!' between the lines. The REAL prospect upsetting Sheldon is the prospect of product liability _eviscerating_ Microsoft.
They're awfully vulnerable around about now, can't continue their geometric progression that props up their stock, and I don't believe in the myth about their piles of cash- I suspect that is a useful lie. Everyone wants to believe that is true, but who has seriously done the accounting work? Microsoft lie, you can't forget that.
That's something I know about as my current desktop and work machines are already whisper-quiet- but they are PowerMacs without need for CPU fans, and they are tower or short tower cases with space inside for acoustic foam. Handled right this little machine could be as quiet and unobtrusive...
That, or since it is plainly capable of processing and I/O sufficient for basic multitrack recording with the right PCI card (and breakout box?), how about picturing it as a teeny Audacity host box? Call it a dedicated DAW and boot it straight into the DAW software, run realtime.
It's very encouraging that these things are not only happening, but can be appealing. I think my only remaining question would be: could this bitty box be not only cute but dead silent? What if you underclock the 1ghz cpu by about 50%?